It's Microsoft Image Composite Editor brought to you by Microsoft Research.
It's photo stitching software that seems to do a very nice job reducing the need for wide angle lenses considerably. You can't beat it at this price since it's free.

Which is nice.

I gave it a first try using two shots I made a few days ago of the foundation of a new house that's being built nearby. It was too wide for a single shot so I took two pictures not really intended for stitching so they had quite a vertical offset. I just opened them both in this software, it crunched on them for a while and then produced a perfectly stitched panorama. I really could not find any signs of stitching in the resulting image. I was quite impressed by its result. Mind you... after only one try I can't know whether it'll do every job as well.

Since the latest version is over a year old you may know of it already but a search here on the forum didn't turn anything up about it so I thought I'd just mention it.
A little holiday present.

You can read about it and download it here.
There's also a 'HD View' there that seems interesting.

Make sure to post your results. Maybe we should have a "D e f i n i t i v e P a n o r a m a T h r e a d".

Ben
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When in doubt..... Press the shutter.

Last edited by Cam-I-Am on Fri Dec 04, 2009 2:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think I tried this before, but didn't find it worked much better (at pixel peeping level) compared to other stitching tools like the one in PSE, the one Canon bundles with their cameras, or ptgui. Agreed it has a price advantage over the others

Still, I think I'll have to have another play with it tonight seeing as there's a 64bit version Probably works the same but faster, and that might be enough reason in itself.

As long as I'm reporting nice free software (I just started the GOTD thread) let me tell you that there is a new version of Microsoft ICE dated 7 June 2010. It's definitely faster than the one I reported at the start of this thread. Worth upgrading or installing if you didn't have it yet.

I also found a Panorama Viewer WPanorama that is quite nice too. If you shoot 360 degrees plus photos and drop them in ICE it crops this to an exactly 360 degrees panorama and if you save it and open it in WPanorama it joins the ends so you can move through the full 360 degrees seamlessly. It can even create a screensaver from your panorama. And also free.

One more tip. Besides a panorama at 100% I let ICE save one at my screen height (1024 vertical) which is very convenient for viewing. If you enter the desired height in the vertical size box and press Tab (or Shift-Tab) to 'activate' that entry it will calculate the other dimension automatically.